


ten steps to a fall

by bam_cassiopeia



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, Gen, Psychological Drama, The Dark Side of the Force, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-25 02:14:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6176270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bam_cassiopeia/pseuds/bam_cassiopeia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Small steps that lead to Leia and Luke fighting on opposite sides.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ten steps to a fall

The first step is when her son is five and Leia realizes he doesn’t have an imaginary friend, but a parasite, and she doesn’t know what to do, and where to direct the growing anger.

Her boy lost a front tooth recently. It makes him look adorable – until he starts babbling about the need to crush one’s enemies. Han makes jokes about Ben having Wookie instincts. She laughs and curses Luke’s foolish quest for jedi scraps. Her husband is a better father than she would have dared hope, not so long ago, but he is completely blinded by paternal love. And not quite as present as he should be, though neither is she, embroiled in Senate meetings and controversy. Still fighting to make sure the Empire can’t rise again.

That, at least, she can do something about.

 

 

The second step is when her son is seven and she realizes how much better her meetings have been going since she started bringing Ben everywhere with her. There’s silence whenever she speaks and more and more, people are agreeing with her. The Senate can’t ignore her anymore. The number of people supporting her views mounts steadily, and she knows she will reach the level of influence she needs.

It’s all happening very naturally, and no one would ever notice anything, Leia knows.

She starts tutoring her son on politics.

Somewhere in the Outer Rim, the Empire is rebuilding. She has the means to do something about it.

 

 

The third step is when her son is still seven and Luke visits, at the most inopportune time he could have chosen. Because she sees him so very rarely now, she forces herself from the Senate for a few days. She can’t help but resent Luke for that. He’s the one who come and goes as he wishes, and she’s the one forever shackled by duty. Her work is delicate, and she fears the interruption will set back her long term plans.

Of course Luke would notice. Her brother frowns a lot. Ben mostly ignores Luke and his concerned looks, just like her. Her son elects to spend the free time Luke’s visit forced Leia to take shadowing his father – even Han noticed the tension, and of course he’s making himself scarcer than usual. Spending all his time on “repairs” in the Falcon. Leia trusts Chewie to make sure nothing happens to Ben, and tries not to worry. At least, not about Ben.

Luke’s pointed looks itch at her, and she knows she should ask him for help, better late than never, but –

She doesn’t. When Luke leaves, sad puppy face in place, her son says she’s the one who should be trusted with the world, since she’s the one doing all the work, and it warms her heart. It shouldn’t. She breaks a priceless Crevassean vase before the tension in her shoulders starts to ease.

 

 

The fourth step is when her son is nine and asks her, crying, thrice damned parasite acting up, to kill him. It’s not the first time. Leia shatters as if it was, as she does every time.

Sometimes, when she’s alone, when she’s tired, she thinks it would be a mercy.

She’s alone, her lap full of the sobbing mess that is the most precious thing she has. Han is gone with Chewie, and she doesn’t even remember the reason this time. Luke is away again, taking the luxury to find himself and his path, all too easily letting her go. Her world and her family are gone, and she’s relinquished the remnants of it years ago. Her son, stolen by shadows, her life work, useless, her fight, never-ending.

Everyone – everything she had, sacrificed for duty, for _nothing_ , and she’s all alone in a dark room, and her baby –

Her baby can live, and the thing can die. She just needs to adjust her plans.

 

 

The fifth step is when her son is ten, and he leaves her, going to his uncle. Han doesn’t understand how she can let Ben leave. What made her change her mind, she who so wanted to keep Ben close?

She hides many things to many people, including Han, but it’s the first time she truly lies to him.

She will do worse to him by the time this is over, of this she’s sure.

 

 

The sixth step is when her son is fifteen, and she hasn’t seen him in five years. She feels the massacre in the force, the bright lights of force sensitives going out one by one. Closes her eyes in pain, dismisses Korr Sella.

Alone, Leia allows herself a drink of the fine, now incredibly rare, alderaanian wine she keeps for important occasions. She drinks it in her darkened office, waiting for official news. She smiles, because soon she won’t be able to.

Luke is the one who comes and tells her Ben fell to the Dark Side and slaughtered the handful of other students. He thinks it’s his fault, and Leia doesn’t correct him. Luke disappears soon after that, but she’s past caring. Her brother has shown himself to be useless when it came to her son, years ago. Damned Jedi.

She waits just long enough before creating the Resistance. It’s ridiculously easy, with the networks she’s built these last years, the contacts of a lifetime. She’s been a senator and a rebel, a princess and a soldier, a queen and a fugitive, an orphan and a sister, an exile, a daughter, a lover a married woman a senator again, above all a fighter. Tragedy follows Leia Organa, and people of all kind flock to her. Her reputation is just another weapon, and she’s not above using it for her crusade.

 

 

The seventh step is when her son is twenty-one, not Ben anymore, but Kylo Ren, First Order enforcer, Knight of Ren, and her last shred of a mental link to him snaps.

 

 

The eighth step is when her son twenty-nine, and it’s an unplanned one.

Rey obviously likes her, even looks up to her, she’d say. She takes a risk when the child comes back from Ahch-To, a well of anger in her eyes, one Leia knows from her own mirror. With vague hopes, she tells the girl the unedited story of her son’s so-called fall.

Rey leaves the Resistance in the dark of the night three days later, aboard the Falcon but leaving Chewie behind, no note, nothing, her friends Finn and Poe bewildered. Leia knows she looks devastated, and that’s why everyone walks on eggshells around her now. She didn’t make a mystery of liking the girl.

Rey reappears months later, spotted during a skirmish near Yag’Dhul. Slowly, the First Order has cut the Resistance from the Inner Rim, boxing them in a corner of the galaxy with the fleets Leia once warned the New Republic Senate about. They’re avoiding direct conflict, too busy consolidating their hold on the rest of the galaxy. Still they guard the shifting borders like wolves, taking every occasion to push Leia’s people towards Wild Space. She knows the Resistance is losing. They don’t even know whose strategy the Order is applying, and don't have the means to push back.

It’s Poe Dameron and his friend Finn who tell her Rey was seen, wearing black and wielding a double bladed lighstaber, when the conflict moved planetside. At Kylo Ren’s side. Both force users surrounded by a guard of dark warriors, the Knights of Ren. Working as a unit for the first time, as far as the Resistance knows. Kylo Ren, they tell her, had Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber. The legacy he’d so wanted, now in his hands.

She thanks Finn and Dameron. She’s about to dismiss them when she changes her mind and offers to share the last of her alderaanian wine with them. Dameron is obviously going to say it’s too much of an honor when his friend elbows him, and he says yes thank you instead, siting back down.

The last of the wine to mark the death of an era.

 

 

The ninth step is when her son is thirty, and he brings her the head of his parasite. He has Rey in tow, and with them an older man, a Grand Admiral, who assesses her with cold eyes. As if she cares. Leia, for the first time in years, cries. Twenty years ago, at her wits’ end, she sent her baby boy on a fool’s crusade, to kill the nightmare that’d sunk his claws in him. And he'd trusted her, and he'd done all she asked, even after the link between them broke. Now he’s here in her arms.

The thing hidden in the shadows is dead, her baby is alive and giving her the galaxy. He only ever trusted her with it, and she will take it, and she doesn’t care that it’s wrong.

She’s broken her baby to save him. She’s destroyed everything she ever held dear, thrown the galaxy into chaos to save him, and now she will rebuild it. For him, for the tiny girl of the desert he’s so obviously enamoured with, because she has so much to atone for.

She will make things better, now. Maybe Luke will help. Maybe they’ll be a family again.

 

 

The tenth step is when her son is thirty-three, Heir to the Empire, Master of the Knights of Ren, the Empress’ very own pack of hounds.

It’s a bright summer day. The Empire is three years old, latest reports indicate reconstruction is going well in the Gaulus Sector and the insurrection in Hapes is finally being put down by Grand Admiral Mitthrawdo. The first stone to the New Alderaanian University was laid two days ago.

Luke and the tatters of her opposition gathered for a last stand, descending on New Alderaan, heart of the Empire. He has to know, of course, he and his people only landed on the planet, only entered the Imperial Palace because Leia allowed it. She wanted to see him, though she knew nothing would come of it. Nothing ever does.

Her brother never understood what she did, and never forgave her actions. Luke never understood the only thing she can’t forgive herself for is what she did to her son, and that she can’t forgive him at all. For not helping when she asked. For his absences, for the freedom he had, all the help he didn’t give, the help he unknowingly gave.

Luke had to know he had no chance to fulfill his mission. He should have stayed away.

He knows, as well as anyone in the galaxy, what power she has at her fingertips, in the person of her son and his wife. He knows, better than anyone, what she did, who she did it for. What Kylo Ren is ready to do for her in return.

Luke should have known Leia was the dangerous one, not Rey, not her baby boy. He shouldn’t have looked so surprised when she doesn’t even leave him the time to engage her heirs before, aim as precise as ever, she disarms him in one shot.

He really, really should have expected it.

She’s always broken beautiful things, and she’s always tried to make it better, and she’s always, always, made everything worse. And still, she tries, no one can say she doesn’t, and even when the rebel at her feet is her brother – he’s just another rebel at the end of the day, yet another sacrifice to the altar of duty. Another man who tried to kill her son, another monster who wanted to steal her baby.

Just another obstacle to her son’s bright future.

One day, her son will finish her lifework, and the Empire will see its end. For now…

 

 

Leia Organa, last Queen of Alderaan, Empress of an Empire reborn, falls the day she kills her brother, and doesn’t notice.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> May contain: pretentiousness is a given, gaze into the abyss yadda yadda, leia being kickass, also going evil I guess, oh well, she’s my queen, my empress, anger issues lol, surprise fleet admiral, him of the mysteriousness, everyone is an asshole, apart from finn and poe I guess, not like they’re here much, apparently I ship dark leia x thrawn, what the fuck me, I really like killing snoke, i really hope the end was a surprise, mwahahahahaha
> 
> my tumblr askbox is always open if you want to be sure i'll react to your comments/questions/something.


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